In which the pond celebrates April Fool's day with a frolic amongst reptile fools...

 

Happy April Fool's Day ... and more fool the pond for spending it amongst reptile fools.

These two reptile stories ...

Ghastly morality of the Greens: Bandt suggests Israel to blame for Hamas butchery
Greens leader Adam Bandt has bizarrely suggested Israel is to blame for Hamas’s brutal executions of Palestinians who had risen up against the terror group’s stranglehold of the Gaza Strip.
By Lily McCaffrey and Noah Yim

EXCLUSIVE
Philanthropist’s millions to fund anti-Semitism fight
The final will of mining tycoon Millie Phillips has been executed by the courts, diverting much of her $62m estate to fund a charitable foundation combating anti-Semitism in Australia.
By Hannah Wilcox

... reminded the pond of a story in Haaretz which you'll never see in the lizard Oz ...

It was by David Issacharoff and titled Israel's Lost Taboo: How Netanyahu's Party Is Officially Embracing Europe's Far-right Extremists, (archive link), Netanyahu's party is supercharging its alliance with European far-right nationalists, despite their antisemitism and neo-Nazi ties. The Israeli government's upcoming antisemitism confab, packed with far-right politicians, is set to cement a once-unthinkable pact. The Likud is now an 'integral part of the extreme, illiberal populist right,' one analyst says

In early February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party became an observer member of Patriots for Europe – a European alliance of far-right nationalist and populist parties.

The move comes amid a broader shift by the Israeli government toward establishing ties with far-right European parties that have long been boycotted by Israel due to their history of antisemitism and neo-Nazi affiliations.

It raises questions about Israel's evolving stance toward groups like Austria's Freedom Party, a member of the Patriots bloc, founded by a former SS general, and Germany's Alternative for Germany party, the AfD, which emerged as the country's second-largest party in last month's federal elections, surpassing the incumbent Social Democrats. 

The AfD is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi culture, and Germany's Jewish community describes it having a "blatantly antisemitic ideology." The Freedom Party, in whose ranks antisemitic and neo-Nazi incidents occur with great regularity, has been described as "antisemitic to its core." 

Make Europe Great Again

The Patriots for Europe alliance includes parties such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz, Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Spain's Vox, among others.

At their inaugural conference in Madrid last month, alliance leaders "warmly" welcomed Likud as an observer, citing "shared values."

And so on and on, deeply weird, Israel in bed with anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi or proto-fascist far right extremists ... read it and weep.

Meanwhile, what else was featured in this day's lizard Oz ...

Still accepting 2GB's dime? Still helping out Nine?

That must be a bitter pill for the reptiles to swallow... but cash in the paw is cash in the paw ...

The 'reptiles in full campaign mode' operation continued ...

EXCLUSIVE

Peter Dutton’s bid to be the new home loan ranger

The Opposition Leader will force the financial regular to ease its overly cautious lending rules for home buyers that have been locking more and more people out of home ownership since the pandemic.

By Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers

So cute, so touching ... a Loan Ranger joke ... and there other efforts to gild the lily, polish the turd or demonise the enemy ...

EXCLUSIVE

Detainees walk to freedom through mandatory sentence loophole

Anthony Albanese’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws threatening 12 months’ jail for hundreds of dangerous NZYQ non-citizens who breach visa conditions have been ‘bungled’, with a loophole allowing offenders to remain free.

By Geoff Chambers and Rhiannon Down

ALP’s ‘private power price claim’

Labor has been accused of privately assuring industry wholesale electricity prices will fall over the next decade while refusing to make the same promise publicly.

By Greg Brown and Richard Ferguson

But amidst the devotion and the fear campaigns came a reptile fear ...

EXCLUSIVE

‘More work to do’: Coalition worried as leader struggles

Former deputy PM Michael McCormack says it’s clear the Coalition has ‘more work to do’ before getting voters onside by May 3, as Liberal MPs raise concern over recent ‘missteps’ taken by party leadership.

By Sarah Ison

Much has been done, but much remains to be done...

Over in the extreme far right section, the usual reptile loons were out and about...

Certain matters could be safely ignored, including Simpleton Simon holding out hope- be gone nabobs of nattering negativity - and most obviously, that absurd Dame Slap offering ...

PNG doesn’t need the left’s absurd gender agenda

Telling kids to get a degree about climate when PNG contributes next to nothing in global emissions and can do nothing about it is another Western frolic.

By Janet Albrechtsen, Columnist

Only Dame Slap could mingle and mangle a "gender agenda" and climate science ...

So to the bromancer, and this day he produced a humdinger, a real cracker full of patented bro zingers...

Read that header again and weep ... Aussies may sour on Trump but we still need him, warts and all, Trump may become so unpopular in Australia that publicly opposing him becomes politically advantageous. That would be very dangerous for Australia. For the moment, we need Trump. That’s the truth.

We need King Donald I? Perhaps in the same way that we need STDs as a way of reducing sexual activity.

Under the header came another inducement to shed tears, “Six weeks ago the Trump effect looked like a plus for Peter Dutton. Now it’s a small minus and a corresponding plus for Anthony Albanese,” writes Greg Sheridan.

Well it is April Fool's day, so on with the Brexit-loving, Cantaloupe-Caligula abiding fool... suddenly aware that the Duttoninator's flirtation with being a mini-me Trump was now a problem, and needed a lot of distancing work ... but only the bromancer could manage that twist by explaining how we needed to fuck the country to save it ...by ignoring the way King Donald is fucking the United States ...

The Trump effect in Australian politics has been reversed. There will be many twists and turns with Donald Trump, who is intensely and intentionally unpredictable.

His new “Liberation Day” tariffs are the latest episode in what is going to be an exhausting global dramedy. Managing Trump will be a high-order challenge for whoever wins our election. But don’t let the theatre blind you to the substance.

Trump will also affect our politics. Six weeks ago the Trump effect looked like a plus for Peter Dutton. Now it’s a small minus and a corresponding plus for Anthony Albanese. The big question, beyond this election, is whether Trump permanently transforms the deep, structural pattern of America’s role in Australian politics.

Six weeks ago in London, former British Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told me a successful Trump presidency would be a huge boost for centre-right politics around the world. Cost-of-living increases were causing incumbent governments to be thrown out all over the place. Albanese looked next.

It wouldn't be a reptile outing without the reptiles also turning up on Sky Noise down under ...The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan calls out Defence Minister Richard Marles, labelling him as “impotent” amid US President Donald Trump’s call to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP. “Trump has made it clear; allies have to look after themselves to a large extent,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News Australia. “Britain has just gone up to 2.5 per cent of GDP, Germany has revolutionised its national debt rules so that it can fund defence, and they’re surrounded by allies. “Here we are, sitting alone, with a massively menacing China.”

Ah the bro and his never-ending, always promised by Xmas war with China, but suddenly he's consumed by saucy doubts and fears ...

Trump’s triumph showed a tough, no-nonsense, plain-speaking tribune of the thoughts and beliefs, and indeed the resentments, of the common man and was the natural leader type for these troubled times.

Then Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance berated, abused and humiliated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in a bizarre White House press circus that, incredibly, went for nearly an hour. The world reassessed Trump.

An example: I dined with a group of friends recently, salt-of-the-earth folk, middle-aged, middle class, much concerned with family, moderately conservative. They’re well educated but politics is far from their first interest.

They’re Australian, so don’t vote in US elections. Whereas they had concluded Joe Biden was hopeless and thought it a good thing America changed to Trump, when we caught up recently they’d changed their view totally, mainly because of the Zelensky episode. They now thought Trump a bully, a braggart, unstable and unreliable.

There would be tens, hundreds of millions of people like these in America and around the world. Trump needlessly alienated a huge segment of natural allies – moderate conservatives.

Of course, Trump could conceivably reverse this. But in highly polarised political environments, parties wildly over-interpret narrow victories. Trump’s election was incidentally a rejection of woke. But it wasn’t a wholesale embrace of every vulgarity, obsession and nastiness of the MAGA fringes.

Nearly half the voters supported woke Kamala Harris. Americans moved away from identity politics and campus Marxism but didn’t necessarily embrace the total spiritual sensibility of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Then came a reminder of that moment that so upset the bromancer... President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office.

As if that were the only bit of madness that warranted a cluck-clucking and tut-tutting ...

So to the real dilemma ...

No one seriously thinks Dutton an Australian Trump. That’s absurd. But the vibe for hard-headed conservative tough guys has been disrupted. When Dutton promised to cut public service numbers, Albanese accused him of copying other people’s policies, obviously referencing Trump.

Albanese didn’t use Trump’s name because he’s scared of provoking a reaction from Trump. Despite Trump’s unpopularity in Australia, that would be dangerous for Albanese. Historically, Australians distinguish presidents they don’t like from the US alliance, which they love. Mark Latham attacked George W. Bush and the Iraq commitment when both were unpopular. That was disastrous for Latham. John Howard increased his majority at the next election.

Gough Whitlam, by far our worst prime minister, and several of his cabinet attacked Richard Nixon and the Americans over Vietnam. Whitlam was crushed in the biggest electoral landslide in Australian history in 1975, and did nearly as badly when he ran again in 1977. Bill Hayden, for whom this column has the greatest respect, as opposition leader flirted with a New Zealand-style ban on visits by nuclear-powered, or nuclear weapons capable, ships. Anti-nuclear was all the rage. But that would have killed the alliance. Australians decisively stuck with the alliance.

Does Trump change this? Right now Trump is, perversely, politically helpful mainly to anti-Trump politicians. In Canada, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, every romantic tween’s ideal of the perfect national leader, were trailing the Conservatives by 20 points. Trump imposed unfair and capricious tariffs on Canada, partly because Trudeau occasionally rubbished him. This transformed Canadian politics. The Liberals are resurgent.

Another reminder of mini-me Trump, dressed for the role, though without a garbage truck to help in the production design ... Peter Dutton

To give you an idea of how 1950s the bromancer is, he begins his next gobbet with blather about "the manly response", though on second thoughts, that's more straight out of Kipling ...

But the bro isn't on board with being manly. He wants to be a cowardly custard, craven, and supine, a flatterer, and a consummate suck ...

The manly response is to talk back to Trump, not take his nonsense. That’s OK for commentators and ex-politicians, it’s no good for national leaders.

As Trudeau and Zelensky demonstrate, Trump may have elements of the buffoon but he’s the world’s most powerful man and can do a nation enormous harm if he chooses to.

Managing Trump successfully requires constant, personal flattery at every interaction.

Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has made concessions to Trump personally and presented them as triumphs of Trump’s deal-making. He has softened, a little, to Mexico as a result. Panama’s government made substantial concessions over the Panama Canal, with little effect. It made the concessions to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump needs constant personal attention and feels neither engaged nor necessarily bound by agreements made by cabinet secretaries.

Vladimir Putin is a dark genius in handling Trump, notwithstanding Trump’s seemingly tough comments this week. Putin commissioned a portrait of Trump. He offers Trump the prospect of all kinds of long-term deals and flatters Trump as a statesman and negotiator.

It’s still difficult to predict and interpret Trump, who can change course radically and abruptly. Trump desires to be always the centre, always holding the destiny of nations, if not the world, in his hands in an endless series of moments of drama and peril that only he can solve. He relentlessly dominates the media.

For no particular reason, then came a snap of Gough Whitlam, allegedly Australia's worst PM, and never mind Billy McMahon, or Harold Holt, both only beaten by George Reid in a 1992 Canberra Times survey ... and both doing exceptionally well in other surveys ... at least until the onion muncher arrived on the scene ... (wiki them all here)

So to the final big suck ...

Thus he says a million different, often contradictory, things.

Can he really believe he will conquer Greenland, or that the Gaza Strip can become the new Riviera? Or are these statements an element of his “genius” in a completely different fashion? They are effective stratagems to dominate the public square, but he may not think them any more possible than they really are. In which case they might be absurd, but still rational, provided you can interpret Trump’s Byzantine psyche at any given moment.

The way Albanese began his campaign indicates he might have learnt something from Trump. Calling an election early Friday morning, after Dutton’s budget reply speech on Thursday night, ruthlessly ensured Labor flooded the zone. These are dangerous days for Dutton. A campaign is like a football match. The hardest thing to get, and the hardest to stop, is momentum.

Trump may become so unpopular in Australia that publicly opposing him becomes politically advantageous. That would be very dangerous for Australia. We have two core interests with Washington. The first is the preservation of the US-Australia alliance. Without it we are literally defenceless. The second is the continued deep involvement of the US in the security, politics and economics of the Indo-Pacific, for there is no benign natural order in this region without the Americans. For the moment, we need Trump. That’s the truth.

The bromancer's desperation reminded the pond of Christopher Warren's effort for Crikey, Finally, an election where Murdoch doesn’t matter — and it’s News Corp’s own fault, After decades of media moguls acting as political kingmakers, we finally have an election where the Murdoch family just won’t have much of a say. (Archive link).

A teaser trailer...

...Even within their narrow audience, the News Corp mastheads are struggling. In the UK, the once dominant The Sun has been out-outraged by the Daily Mail and out-politicked by GB News. According to the company’s report to its US regulator, take-up of The Sun’s digital “offering” in December was half what it had been the year before. In the US, the New York Post reported a 27% slump in its year-on-year numbers.

That’s a lot of people no longer getting their news refracted through the Murdoch lens.

In the real world — where ordinary people live and vote —  the Murdochs just don’t matter. In the more surreal world of political institutions, political parties and the political press corps, it’s proving hard to break with traditions that go back at least to 1921 when Sir Keith Murdoch began turning his editorship of the Melbourne Herald to the family hobby of making (and breaking) prime ministers

It’s bad news for Australia’s Liberals, with the Murdoch media commitment to puffing Trump (particularly among its conservative opinion-setting commentariat on Sky News and The Australian) keeping the US president’s shenanigans in the news in a manner that threatens to act to the detriment of Trump-adjacent parties. 

It also demands that the Liberals tie themselves tightly to the Trumpian elements of the right’s agenda, like the promised DOGE-style gutting of  the public sector and the Musk-ite obsession with working from home...

And again ...

...The bluster of those News Corp pundits who were once on high rotation on the ABC’s talk radio and TV panel shows  seem to have largely blown themselves out. The only semi-regular News Corp guests on the broadcaster’s flagship  Insiders seem to be the least News Corp-like of their reporters: the tabloids’ national political editor Clare Armstrong, and news.com.au political editor Samantha Maiden.

News.com.au is the last of the US company’s mass media products in the Australian market. Maiden’s commentary on Insiders this weekend gave us a glimpse of how that frees the site’s reporting from the usual News Corp constraints, with her astute explanation of her broader audience’s reaction to the Dutton job cuts (The Australian commentariat may love ‘em. Looks like the public hates ‘em).

As for the rest of what the company has to say, should we care? Should anyone?

Steady on, of course the pond cares. 

How else to fill in April Fool's day?

All that perversely reminded the pond of another current mango Mussolini fuss ...

‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

Normally staid historians sound alarm at authoritarian grasping for control of the premier US museum complex

Aren't we past the "reminds" yet? Wouldn't a simple "it is" suffice?

...David Blight, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian’s secretary, said: “I haven’t talked to him yet. I’m sure he’s trying to decide what to do. I hope he doesn’t resign but that’s probably what they want. They want the leadership of the Smithsonian, the directors of these museums, to resign so they can replace them.”

Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was “appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised”, when he read the executive order. “There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,” he said. “I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.”

The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.

“I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It’s a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we’ve been writing for a century.”

Trump’s previous cultural targets have included the Kennedy Center and Institute of Museum and Library Services. This week he urged congressional Republicans to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He has also threatened to cut funding to universities refusing to bend the knee.

Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried never to have.”

The sentiment was echoed by Raymond Arsenault, a professor of southern history at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. He said: “What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.

He added: “It’s so chilling. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.”

Arsenault, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American museum, said the late congressmen would be “shocked” by Trump’s order: “It’s totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.”

To that list you could add Jill Lawrence in The Bulwark, Trump’s Latest Bid to Rewrite Reality

From the Smithsonian to statues, he wants to whitewash America’s past.

...The irony here is that Trump—along with Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and many others in his administration—is right now doing tremendous damage to liberty, individual rights, and human happiness. Abducting immigrants and throwing them into foreign prisons? Thoughtlessly firing government experts? Kicking patriotic transgender service members out of the armed forces? Gutting government grants on science? It’s not our historians and museum curators who are weaving that tale of woe and misery.

Then there was David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast, EXECUTIVE DISORDER, Why Mad King Trump’s Lunatic Edicts Risk America as We Know It, Make no mistake, executive orders going after “improper ideology” are a dangerous step from a would-be King George. (archive link)

...these orders can serve to buttress other administration initiatives in dangerous ways. For example, Trump’s order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” On its face, it appears to be just another weird preoccupation with exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Zoo, putting the Vice President in charge of fixing the places up.
What damage could such an exercise do? After all, the Smithsonian is not under the control of the president! He has no authority to alter its content or behavior in any way. And if he wants to send J.D. Vance to pick a fight with a panda well, that’s probably less damage than he might do participating in high-level national security chats or during recon for an invasion of Greenland.
But the order contained several elements that are in fact, deeply disturbing. One, of course, is that it is racist to its core, a manifestation of white supremacists’ long-standing grievances with depictions of American history that actually tell the truth about our bloody and cruel past. 
And it contains one phrase in particular that made my blood run cold, because of what it plainly says about what Trump and his aides are trying to engineer here in America: Down deep, in the section dubiously titled “Saving Our Smithsonian,” is the requirement that the VP and other aides work with the people who run our national museums to “remove improper ideology from such properties.”
Improper ideologies? Those alone are two words that signal the end of America as we know it. There are not supposed to be “improper ideologies” in these United States, a country with freedom of expression woven into the fabric of its founding documents. 
Asserting that our national museums must not address slavery, the genocide against indigenous people or the repression of women is one step away from banning saying that it is dangerous to have a country run by a group of racist, fascist billionaires and their toadies. And it is really, really important we be able to say such things, because that is just what is happening.
Authoritarian states seek to suppress not just dissent but also all forms of thinking and analysis that run contrary to the narratives by which their leaders cling to or exercise their power. Asserting that we must scrub our museums of “improper ideologies” would be dangerous enough on its own. But it is part of a broader war on knowledge and truth that should be chilling to every American. It is unprecedented. It is profoundly dangerous. Our fundamental freedoms are being stripped away.
Who knows, many may already be largely gone.

Back to The Bulwark and there was historian Thomas Lecaque with Trump’s Big New Propaganda Push

Nothing says “restoring truth and sanity to American history” quite like lying about it.  

...As a historian, I find it surreal and even a bit unnerving to read an executive order about “restoring truth in American history” that is full of outright lies. But what else is to be expected out of the Trump administration?

It’s not just about the Smithsonian Institution, or its American Art Museum, or the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The executive order Trump signed on March 27, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” is part of a much larger project of reframing America. If you’ll forgive me for quoting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (banned from schools in my state of Iowa until a judge temporarily intervened), “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

In one sense, this pithy saying is not true: Professional historians, even if you think they control the past, have very little power over the present or the future, as the continuing demolition of the academic humanities makes plain. But the maxim is one of the bedrocks of how tyranny engages with history: crafting a mythic golden age that “they” “stole” from “us.” Totalitarians know how to tell a good story with friends and enemies, heroes and villains.

Taking into account the deportation flights, the arrests and disappearances, the visa cancellations, the ignoring of due process and judicial authority, and the bad-faith lawsuits and attacks on the rule of law, it’s clear that we’re well on our way to the massive consolidation of power that characterizes fascism. But fascism is more than simple authoritarianism. It is distinguished by a larger ideology that provides a semblance of political justification for the actions of the regime.

And so on, and the pond needs all that like it needs a hole in its head, and that's the truth.

And so to wrap up with a standard Groaning, a bit longer than her usual efforts, timed as a five minute read by the reptiles, PM can flee energy modelling, but not the mess it’s left us, The reality is that if we were only interested in affordable and reliable electricity, we would have stuck with coal and replaced the ageing plants with high-efficiency, low-emissions plants.

Members of the Dame Groan cult might be disappointed, because it's just a bog standard bout of renewables bashing, beginning with that arch villain, Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail in Western Australia, visiting St John of God Midland Hospital in Perth.

It goes without saying that Dame Groan loves to shoot from the hip with her own vibe rather than relying on anything as wretched as modelling ... after all, if you relied on modelling, you might also think the planet's climate is in a sorry state, and then where would you be? 

Why, bereft of beautiful dinkum virginal Oz coal and with no way to gas the country and the planet ...

I’m not a big fan of economic modelling. It does have a role, and I have a grudging admiration for modellers and their technical skills.

When it comes to posing “what if?” questions, it can be useful because it places some numerical estimates on the likely impact of certain changes, including the standard errors attached to the estimates. As for predicting what will happen, however, economic modelling is basically a bust.

The faith Anthony Albanese placed in economic modelling was always surprising given his university major in political economy, a left-wing subject not known for its emphasis on empirical estimation.

He claimed the modelling done by RepuTex on future power prices was “the most comprehensive modelling ever done for any policy by any opposition in Australia’s history since Federation”. According to this modelling, average electricity prices would fall by $275 for households by 2025 from their 2022 level.

When asked how he could be certain, he simply declared: “I don’t think, I know.” This was because of Labor’s “suite of policies”.

Inevitably the reptiles dragged in Sky Noise ... Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell says Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is “selling” cheaper energy on the campaign trail. The Coalition will provide additional details about its pledge to reduce power prices “over the next couple of days”, with Peter Dutton flagging the release of “percentage figures” showing the impact of its policies. “The trouble is, he can’t tell you how much cheaper your energy is going to be if he is elected; whether it’s gas or electricity,” Mr Clennell said. “They seem determined not to come up with a promise like Labor’s $275.”

On with gassing the country, and not to save the planet ...

So fast-forward to today, and the Prime Minister is backing away from the modelling as fast as he can. He can try to blame the Ukraine war or global events more generally – these factors have now largely washed through the system – but he was always extremely ill-advised to rely on the modelling in the way he did.

In fact, the modelling was far from comprehensive. A reasonable stab at predicting wholesale electricity prices was made, although the underlying assumptions didn’t come to pass. But retail electricity prices comprise wholesale prices, transmission and distribution costs, and retail costs. It’s a complicated equation, with transmission and distribution costs the largest component. When it comes to wholesale prices, it’s the marginal supplier that sets the price. During the day when there’s a great deal of solar and often wind power, the price can easily be very low or even negative.

But when the sun sets and the wind dies down, it will be the dispatchable generators that will determine the price – coal or gas, in the main. As the coal-fired power stations begin to reach the end of their lives, gas will increasingly become the price setter in the electricity market.

While the Labor government realises this in theory, the Coalition has a more concrete plan to bring more gas into the system, which should ease some of the price pressures. But before I consider the Coalition’s gas plans, let me deal with the increasing cost of the transmission and distribution system, which will begin to contribute to higher electricity prices very soon.

One of the main disadvantages of dispersed renewable energy is that it requires a massive expansion in the transmission system to link far-flung installations to the grid. Some of these new transmission lines may only be used lightly – say, a quarter of the time – but their full cost will be passed on to consumers if the energy regulator deems them “regulated assets”.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has declared we need an additional 10,000 kilometres of transmission lines. There is also a figure of 28,000 kilometres floating around to meet net zero by 2050.

Ah, net zero, the bane of Dame Groan's life, as the reptiles slipped in another snap, Peter Dutton shakes hands Chris Bowen at the Assyria New Year at Fairfield Showgrounds.

You might think it should end there, but it never ends there. Dame Groan is a tremendous conservationist, deeply concerned for parks and wildlife, and it's all the fault of renewables, and never you mind all that blather about climate science, and whether all creatures great and small might actually have a habitable planet in the next few decades ...

But it doesn’t end there. There are several additional costs associated with renewable energy. As coal leaves the system, the grid needs to find alternative ways of stabilisation without the constantly spinning turbines.

Large-scale batteries can help – for a price. There is also a proposal around for large-scale spinning condensers to be installed – again for a price. The point is that what used to be provided incidentally and for free by the coal-fired power station is now an additional component of electricity prices.

Each week we learn about regional communities and land holders objecting to the construction of massive transmission lines and renewable energy installations. The way economists think about these legitimate objections is that external costs are being imposed on some citizens without adequate recognition or compensation.

Simply viewing the environmental degradation being visited on the Kosciuszko National Park surely makes most reasonable people wonder whether the whole renewable energy project has gone too far. Can you imagine that sort of damage being acceptable for a nearby mining development?

As for offshore wind developments, the most likely outcome is that most of the projects will never proceed. The reality is hitting home that the economics of offshore wind simply do not stack up. The initial construction costs are far too high, and the maintenance costs are astronomical. The concerns of the affected seaside communities cannot be fully addressed.

This is a major concern in Victoria, where the plans of its hapless Energy Minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, are highly dependent on major offshore wind developments occurring within a relatively brief period of time. Her department’s modelling – there’s that term again – shows without offshore wind, more than 70 per cent of the state’s landmass would need to be covered with wind and solar installations – with most of that land held privately – to meet her renewable energy targets.

Now, what to make of the Coalition’s plans to insist on some domestic reservation for east coast gas as a means of bringing down the domestic supply of gas?

The requirement will only apply to spot gas, not to gas subject to long-term contractual arrangements. On the face of it, this is a good outcome: forcing suppliers to break contracts would be bad for a country’s reputation.

Poor Lily, for her pains, she scored a huge snap, Lily D’Ambrosio.

Then it was on with the wrap, and as well as a final gassing, there was a hint of fatalistic resignation ...

Second, there is likely to be a concerted effort for new gas supplies to be developed – think Bowen, Surat, Beetaloo, Narrabri, even Gippsland – and this should ease gas shortages as well as the pressure on prices. It’s perfectly reasonable for new investments to be subject to reservation arrangements. The Coalition also anticipates committing around $1bn to support gas-related infrastructure such as pipelines and storage facilities.

It won’t be possible to accurately model this policy stance, particularly because timing will be uncertain. But the point is it gives some meat to the bones of the proposition that gas must playing a leading role in the electricity grid going forward.

Labor is more talk rather than action, reflecting the ongoing pressure it feels from anti-gas environmental groups.

The reality is that if we were only interested in affordable and reliable electricity, we would have stuck with coal and replaced the ageing plants with high-efficiency, low-emissions plants that are now commonplace in certain parts of the world, including China. This would have avoided the massively expensive expansion of the transmission and distribution systems.

But once emissions reduction was added to the list of criteria, the game changed. In fact, the energy market operator puts the need to reduce emissions as the primary requirement, with affordability and reliability secondary considerations. This is one of the reasons for the mess we are now facing.

It is simply not fiscally sustainable to keep giving every household $300 per year to reduce their electricity bills.

Gas will partly rescue us, but we may simply need to get used to higher electricity bills and the deindustrialisation associated with high energy costs.

Oh say it ain't so Dame Groan, don't be so glum, just enjoy singing in the rain with the immortal Rowe ...

It's the details the pond enjoys, always the details ...

Look, down there at the bottom of the pole ... how could Dame Groan have forgotten to nuke the country to save it ... and the planet?

Gas will partly rescue us, but we may simply need to get used to higher electricity bills and the deindustrialisation associated with high energy costs.

There's a hole in your energy bucket? Why then just nuke it, dear Groaner, just nuke it ...